Autonation Punts Its Super Bowl Ad Effort

December 21, 1999|By DAVID ALTANER Business Writer

AutoNation has canceled its planned Super Bowl ads in the wake of the closing last week of its chain of used-car superstores.

The Fort Lauderdale-based retailer won't be competing in the nation's most well-known advertising vehicle. The ads attain a high profile -- critics rate them as if they were prime-time sitcoms -- and usually are rewarded with the biggest TV audience of the year. But they are tremendously costly, an average of $2 million for 30 seconds this year, and many of the ads are so full of outrageous humor or other attention getting devices that it's difficult to break through the clutter.

With the decision to close the superstores, "the relevance of a national advertising campaign becomes less pressing," said spokesman Jim Donahue. "The focus now is on taking costs out of the system at the dealership level."

Last Monday, AutoNation announced the closing or conversion of its 37 used-car superstores, ending an experiment in creating a national brand of auto dealers selling a variety of manufacturers' brand names. The company will now focus on improving its network of 400-plus traditional dealers.

The company has been trying to slowly unify that dealer network, market by market, under an umbrella of joint promotion and one-price selling. But that change has been taking place under several names, because the company has had difficulty getting the six major manufacturers to agree on one name. In Denver, the market became John Elway AutoNation, and on Dec. 26, the Tampa market is scheduled to become AutoWay AutoNation. No date has been scheduled for unifying the South Florida network of dealers, which includes names such as Maroone Autoplaza, Wallace Ford AutoNation and Mullinax Ford AutoNation.

The pace of the change, plus the number of different names, is another reason not to do a Super Bowl ad yet.

"When we do business under different names, having a national ad campaign is not a compelling story," Donahue said.